Assistant Professor
Areas of Interest: 20th-21st century American literature, poetry and poetics, creative writing, public humanities
Apple Teacher
Education:Ph.D., University of Rochester
M.A., University of Rochester
B.A. Haverford College
Dr. Nikolis joined the faculty at St. John Fisher University in 2021. Her academic research focuses on confession and secrecy in post-1945 American poetry, with special interest in poetry and the public humanities. In her creative writing, she explores the intersections of visual art, place, and the body. You can find her work in Humanities, The Shore, Birdcoat Quarterly, the Tampa Review, and Arkansas International.
Publications
Selected Scholarly Research
- “Ritual and Assemblage: Reading Hybrid Elegy through Changing American Death Practices,” Humanities: Special Issue on Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry, June 2025.
- “Access, Aboutness, and Author(ity): The Poetics of Self-Translation in Joan Naviyuk Kane” in Sharing the World: Global Women’s Writing in the 21st Century. Edited by Esther Sanchez-Pardo, 2027.
- “Lyric After Lyricization: Learning and Unlearning the Lyric ‘I’ in the Activist Classroom,” in Teaching Poetry Now. Edited by Caroline Gelmi and Lizzy LeRud, 2027.
Selected Creative Research
- “Barbasol Hologram,” LIT Magazine, Summer 2025.
- “The Island Aubades,” The Shore, Summer 2025.
- “thrill of the bop,” Birdcoat Quarterly, Spring 2025.
- “Transfiguration,” Ghost City Review, May 2024.
- “Late Peach Season,” Stone Canoe, Spring 2024.
- “New York Poems,” Stone Canoe, Spring 2022.